Beloved people of
God, grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ.
AMEN.

Two Sundays ago we
wrestled with Jesus’ troubling teaching in Luke 14:26: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate
father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life
itself, cannot be my disciple.”

It does not get
any easier this Sunday. We are supposed to try and make sense of Jesus
commending a dishonest manager for acting shrewdly. Last week all our Associate
Pastor had to do was talk about Jesus seeking and finding a cute little lost
sheep.

Our gospel reading
for today is surely the most confusing parable Jesus told. And it doesn’t help
that it is focused on an issue people tend to be reluctant to discuss: how we
handle our money.

For centuries
Biblical scholars have had only marginal success seeking to bring clarity to
this parable. Numerous questions have been raised about the exact nature of the
manager’s dishonesty. To what extent did he overcharge the tenants? When he
reduced their debt, was he stealing from the rich man or was he simply giving
back his commission to the debtors? In “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,”
immediately preceding “The Parable of the Dishonest Manager,” we are told that
the wayward son squandered his property in dissolute living. The same Greek term
translated “squandering” is used to describe what the dishonest manager was
doing with his property. Does “his” refer to the landlord’s property or to the
dishonest manager’s property? We cannot be completely
sure.

In studying “The
Parables of Jesus” in seminary we were taught that parables tend to make one
primary point. This parable has a series of main points tacked on to the end of
it.

One, people
outside the community of faith are more shrewd than those inside the community
of faith.

Two, make friends
for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth. Surely Jesus is not encouraging us
to use dishonest means to acquire wealth so that we can use it to make friends—
or is he?

Three, whoever is
faithful in a very little is faithful in much.

Four, if you have
not been faithful with dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true
riches?

And finally, no
one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and
wealth.

These may all be
good points, but we are still left wondering: what is the main point of this
parable? As Professor Vööbus, who taught “The Parables of Jesus,” often said, we
need a “more penetrating analysis.” In the midst of our confusion, what clarity
can begin to emerge? What clarifying clues can we uncover? Perhaps a main point
can emerge, even if we cannot get all our questions answered
satisfactorily.

First of all,
notice that the primary charge the debtors make against the manager is not that
he has cheated them. They charge him with squandering his property. As mentioned
above, like the prodigal son, he was using his wealth to engage in dissolute
living— eating and drinking excessively, hiring prostitutes, gambling, buying
expensive clothes, and the like. He was flashing around the wealth he had access
to in front of the hard-working tenant farmers who had made it possible for him
to enjoy a lavish lifestyle. It is understandable that they were resentful. We
can surmise that these tenants were treated well by the landlord. The manager’s
behavior did not reflect well on the landlord, and they were concerned for his
reputation as well as for themselves.

The manager knew
he was in trouble when the landlord summoned him. He fully anticipated he would
be fired. So he shrewdly came up with a plan to salvage the situation. Before
the tenants heard he had been fired, he summoned them one by one. We get a
report on two of those transactions. He cut the debt of the first in half. He
reduced the debt of a second by 20%. These were major
reductions.

In our “Parables
of Jesus” course Professor Vööbus made a convincing case that the manager was
returning exorbitant commissions that he charged these tenants. It made no sense
to Vööbus that the master would have commended the manager for stealing money
from the master to reduce the tenants’ debt. According to Vööbus, the manager in
his moment of crisis, when all seemed to be lost, came to his senses and
discovered who these tenants really were— not objects to be exploited, but his
friends on whom his future depended. He fully realized how interdependent he was
with other people. The reference to being welcomed into the eternal homes also
indicates that he discovered how important his relationship with God was. In
addition, he discovered that his relationship with other people could not be
separated from his relationship with God.[1]

Jesus taught that
the two greatest commandments are: You shall the Lord your God with all your
heart, mind, soul, and strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
That was another way of stressing how interdependent or interrelated we are with
God and our neighbors.

Whether the
manager was using his exorbitant commission or his master’s wealth, he was
taking advantage of his position to support a lavish self-serving lifestyle. He
was running up huge personal expenses and making a show of the wealth to which
he had access.

The primary
message of this parable may not be as confusing as it may first appear. Jesus
taught a great deal about money and possessions. At least sixteen of the
thirty-eight parables teach something about handling our wealth. At least 10
percent of the verses in the gospels focus on some aspect of our money and
possessions. In “The Parable of the Dishonest Manager” Jesus stresses the
importance of using our wealth to make friends. What could be more important
than making friends and cultivating healthy relationships with God and our
fellow human beings!

It is also true
that Jesus and the Bible put special emphasis on making friends with those in
the greatest need. The tenant farmers in our parable for today would not have
been wealthy people. For God and Jesus it was unacceptable to take advantage of
them. In our Old Testament lesson for today the prophet Amos, speaking on behalf
of God, takes the rich to task for trampling on the needy and bringing to ruin
the poor of the land. Amos makes clear that God is fed up with managers who “practice deceit with false balances, buying
the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the
sweepings of wheat” (8:5–6). The Psalmist stresses that “[The Lord] raises the poor from the dust,
and lifts the needy from the ash heap” (113:7).

Clearly God is a
friend of the poor and needy and wants us to be the same. God wants us to use
our wealth to make friends with them.

We live in one of
the richest nations in the world. Questions of justice have been raised about
why the wealthiest nations have what they have. The Parable of the Dishonest
Manager does not directly address such justice questions. The main point is to
use our wealth to make friends with those with whom we are interdependent,
however we acquired our wealth. But make no mistake: it does not advocate
continuing to acquire wealth unjustly or dishonestly. Jesus makes clear that the
time is now to recognize the reality of our interdependence and to use our
wealth accordingly.

In our time we are
waking up to the reality of how interrelated we are with all God’s creatures. We
are participants in an Earth community in which the well-being of all creatures,
including human beings, is dependent on the well-being of all other creatures.
Too many of us human beings have been squandering our wealth in dissolute,
excessively consumptive, living; and the whole Earth community is paying the
price, especially the least of these among us, both people and other
creatures.

Now is the time to
recognize, as the dishonest manager did, that we have lost our way. Now is the
time to discover how interrelated we are with God and all members of the Earth
community. Now is the time to use our wealth, however we have acquired it, to
make friends with God, to make friends with our fellow human beings, and to make
friends with our fellow creatures.

This fall during
the A Home for All campaign we will
be lifting up and reflecting on a number of stewardship principles to guide us
in discerning how we are to use our money and possessions. The Parable of the
Dishonest Manager teaches us that we would do well to focus on using our wealth
to make friends. Making friends with God, our fellow human beings, and our
fellow creatures is the way to the eternal home for all.